Our lost heritage: The lost architectural treasures of the 19th century

Much of our finest architecture is Victorian, but there was so much more of it until the 20th century wiped it out. Now a new book traces Britain's vanished treasures, including many in Scotland

WANDER through any city in Britain today and your eyes will be drawn skywards. Many of the spires and chimneys which puncture our cities' skylines are legacies of the Victorian era. Today they are, by and large, treasured – however, the ones which still stand merely represent what's left of an architectural era that took a battering in the 20th century.

Architectural historian Dr Gavin Stamp joined heritage campaign group the Victorian Society as a schoolboy and has been fascinated by the architecture of the period ever since. In a new book, Lost Victorian Britain: How the Twentieth Century Destroyed the Nineteenth Century's Architectural Masterpieces, he laments the loss of some of the UK's most beautiful and significant buildings over the last century. Such masterpieces have fallen foul of town planners, fire and Second World War bombs, and include everything from railway stations to churches.

Stamp opens the book with a quote from PG Wodehouse: "Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks," he wrote in 1937. Wodehouse is describing his fictional Walsingford Hall, a "celebrated eyesore in all its revolting hideousness" – however, such an attitude was shared by many at the time.

Stamp explains: "The book is a reflection of the 20th century's contempt for the 19th century. Victorian buildings were particularly well built. They were built to last and they were imaginative in their interpretation of the past. They had a civic sensibility and to destroy them is just such a waste, but it has happened time and time again, and can still happen."

He adds that the word "Victorian" was a derogatory one in the 1920s and 1930s. By this time, Austrian architect Adolf Loos had already dismissed ornamentation as "criminal" and modernists including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies Van Der Rohe were applying the principle that form should follow function.

Of course, fashions alter, and each generation tends to despise and rebel against the styles of the one which came before it. While many Victorian buildings were damaged beyond repair during the Second Workd War, many too were unceremoniously torn down thanks to changing tastes.

By 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson was declaring that: "All over the country, the grime, muddle and decay of our Victorian heritage is being replaced and the quality of urban life uplifted!" Glasgow was

particularly affected by this attitude, with vast swaths of tenements being cleared and a motorway driven through the city centre. "The time may come," said one planning convenor in 1964 when announcing that two churches by Alexander "Greek" Thomson would not be retained, "when we may have to consider putting up a plaque instead of retaining certain buildings."

Sadly he was right. Across Britain, where once there stood some of the best examples of solidly built Victorian architecture, plaques commemorate what once was. In many cases, there is no reminder of the old occupant of a site; merely cheap new buildings, many of which were constructed recently to replace shoddy buildings thrown up in the mid-20th century in a misguided attempt at modernisation.

All that survives today of these Victorian masterpieces are the black and white photographs taken before their destruction and now collected in Lost Victorian Britain…, a reminder of the architectural heritage we have lost, and can't have back.

CRAIGENDS COUNTRY HOUSE, NR JOHNSTONE

SOME of the most opulent examples of Victorian architecture are to be found in country houses, which tended to be bigger and more elaborate in every sense in this period than earlier examples. Built in 1857, Craigends, near Johnstone, was, says Stamp, "one of the very best examples of Scottish Baronial." Just over a century after it was built, Craigends lay in ruins. Built for Alexander Cunninghame, it was inherited by his son, whose wife was awarded life tenancy when he died in 1917. She lived in it with her sister until the 1960s, by which point it had become a rather romantic-looking ruin. "As the house is not far from Glasgow, a new institutional use for it was surely possible," laments Stamp. Instead it was demolished. In 1998, private houses were built on the land.THE NO 1 SPINNING MILL, PAISLEY

IN VICTORIAN times, Paisley was dominated by two families in the cotton thread-spinning business, Clark and Coats. The latter built the No 1 Spinning Mill in 1887, a grand building which communicated the family's power and prestige to the area. When the thread industry declined in the mid-20th century, the building was abandoned. Stamp says: "Splendid and solid, the Spinning Mill could have been converted into flats or used to house small businesses. But Renfrew District Council was determined to wipe out what it regarded as the shameful relics of Paisley's capitalist past and repeatedly tried to raze the building." Because it was A-listed, however, the structure could only be demolished with permission from the Secretary of State for Scotland. Permission was granted in 1992. A housing estate – described by Stamp as "mediocre and characterless in design" – took its place.

LIFE ASSOCIATION BUILDING, EDINBURGH

RESPECTED architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock described the Life Association of Scotland building at No 80 Princes Street as "the best of all buildings in Britain in the Venetian High Renaissance style". Erected in 1855-8, the building – which also contained the Bedford Hotel – was designed by David Rhind. In 1954 it was suggested that a first-floor walkway be incorporated on Princes Street, a proposal which threatened the building with demolition. Ten years later, the listed building was facing redevelopment. Expressing their disappointment, the Victorian Society described it as "perhaps the best of the few buildings of any merit in the entire length of Princes Street". Despite objections (The Scotsman at the time carried the headline "Princes Street Glory will Fall in Rubble") the building was demolished in 1967-8. Its replacement, says Stamp, "merely contributed to the continuing degradation of Princes Street."

THE CAIRNEY BUILDING, GLASGOW

BUILT in 1860-1 for the stained-glass manufacturer John Cairney, the Cairney Building on Glasgow's Bath Street was designed by one of Scotland's most famous architects, Alexander "Greek" Thomson, and is considered one of his most innovative and extraordinary commercial buildings. Marrying masonry and cast iron and utilising large plate-glass windows, it was destroyed around 1935 to make way for an extension of the Corporation Transport Offices. Many similar Victorian cast-iron commercial buildings in Glasgow have met the same fate, with all but two now destroyed.QUEEN'S PARK UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, GLASGOW

A NUMBER of Alexander "Greek" Thomson's buildings have been under threat over the years, and for Stamp, chairman of the Alexander Thomson Society, they are of particular interest. One of the worst losses detailed in his book, and one which Stamp finds particularly painful, is Thomson's Queen's Park United Presbyterian Church in Glasgow, which was hit by incendiary bombs during one of the last German air raids on the Clyde, in 1943. Stamp describes the incident as "Scotland's worst architectural loss of the Second World War". The building took its influences from ancient Greek and Egyptian architecture and featured a stunning interior, its galleries and clerestory supported on iron columns. When the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown saw inside the church in 1883 he commented: "I want nothing better than the religion that produced art like that. Here line and colouring are suggestive of paradise itself. Well done Glasgow!"

DUNDEE WEST RAILWAY STATION

"SOME of the greatest and most characteristic buildings of the (Victorian age] were railway stations," says Stamp. It being the railway age, in 1875 Building News described railways stations and hotels as "truly the only representative buildings we possess". However, thanks to private enterprise, railway stations and lines were often duplicated, a problem evident in Dundee: a passenger arriving from Perth on the Caledonian Railway who wanted to travel east would have to alight at Dundee West station and traipse across town to Dundee East station, which was the terminus of the Dundee & Arbroath Railway. Another line, on which Dundee's station sits today, ran between the two. Dundee West was rebuilt in 1888-9 in the Scottish Baronial style, with a clock tower modelled on municipal buildings in Aberdeen. Dundee East was closed in 1959; Dundee West followed six years later – it was demolished to make way for roads connecting with the Tay Road Bridge.

• Lost Victorian Britain: How the Twentieth Century Destroyed the Nineteenth Century's Architectural Masterpieces by Gavin Stamp is published by Aurum Press, 25